By Maria Padhila
One of the things I love most about polyamory is that people in it acknowledge and even celebrate that there are different kinds of love at different times. And what?s more, they don?t put a value judgment on it ? or when they do, that judgment and what?s behind it has to be examined.
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.
I don?t want to go into anything that touches near to some kind of ?poly people are more evolved? nonsense. But even the most monogamous or solitary soul would probably admit that in at least in this one way, poly people seem to have more fun.
In the world of ?normal? love and marriage ? well, the image that a percentage of the world likes to project as normal, let?s call it that ? love is defined as follows: there?s a strong, wild first stage, but that?s just infatuation. (Pause for eyeroll, tsking and sighing headshaking.) It?s immature. It?s silly and worthless. It?s the kind of thing you don?t give in to. You just wait for it to pass and try not to make a big ass of yourself.
Then, you buy a sofa together and a TV and/or other electronic devices and you sit down on it in between working to buy things and you stay there and get your instructions about new things to buy. That?s true love. That?s mature love. Once in a while, the man begs for sex and the woman gives in. That?s normal love.
Even many of those who don?t buy into the entombed version of ?mature love?, even those who keep on with their energy and interest and juice into the end, still often have a distrust of ?infatuation?. It?s as if it is fool?s gold, a big phony fake of an illusion that has to be seen through and denied and fought down to get to the real stuff.
But fool?s gold is real stuff. Pyrite isn?t gold, but it has its uses, mostly industrial; it?s been used in manufacturing and transforming processes since the middle ages. And it?s pretty all on its own.
Infatuation is real, too. It has its uses, and it?s fine on its own as well. Poly people even have a name for it: New Relationship Energy. It?s a great natural power source. You use it; you bring some home and pass it around. If the others you love understand where it?s coming from, they can warm themselves in the solar-like power of NRE ? if they don?t let their own shadows get in the way of the glow.
I love that this stage of love can be enjoyed, talked about, not denigrated as ?immature?. I love that I have open the possibility to enjoy it several times in my life, if the fates allow, and if I can be open to it, without it being seen as an inevitable precursor to breaking someone else?s heart. It may lead to immature behavior if you don?t get the daily stuff done despite the high, but that?s not the fault of the pyrite ? it?s the problem in how you use it.
As with all emotions and inclinations, being aware of what?s going on is half the battle. What?s the other half? Communicating about it. Because poly people who are working it well see NRE, call it for what it is, and talk about it, it doesn?t have to be damaging. It also doesn?t have to turn into a once-in-a-lifetime high that one has to clutch at and hold secret and try to keep alive forever. Energy is useless if you don?t let it flow.
An article last week pointed to several studies that have been done over the past decade that trace NRE as a biological and evolutionary phenomenon. I?m still weighing the importance and the legitimacy of pop evolutionary psychology ? I?m afraid of it being used to explain away a lot of bad behavior as much as it is used to help us understand ourselves ? but it?s still interesting. Here are a few chunks that will only be a news flash to those who have never enjoyed music, a poem or a crush:
American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings were clear: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts, on average, for just two years. Then the special joy wears off and they are back where they started, at least in terms of happiness. The findings, from a 2003 study, have been confirmed by several recent studies.
Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation. Laboratory studies in places as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Stony Brook, N.Y., are persuasive: both men and women are less aroused after they have repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that it breeds indifference. Or, as Raymond Chandler wrote: ?The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.?
We may love our partners deeply, idolize them, and even be willing to die for them, but these feelings rarely translate into long-term passion. And studies show that in long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex, and to lose it sooner. Why? Because women?s idea of passionate sex depends far more centrally on novelty than does men?s.
What?s interesting here is that little piece at the end (of course, I also love that the writer quoted Chandler): Women need novelty more than men do? How about that. Just another way that our image of ?normal? love may be skewed, because the mature image says that women want to settle and men want to ramble. I think I won?t find much argument around these parts if I assert that what many mistake for women?s passivity is actually resignation.
According to this article, the Two Year Itch has a psych name: hedonic adaptation. My dear friend is going into the second year of a relationship, and she emails me things like, ?I know we haven?t been going out much, but it?s just because sometimes I just want to spend whole days lying there just smelling him.? Can I get a hell yeah? If we?re wired for this sort of thing, why not enjoy it, instead of trying to shut it down?
It is like a drug; it works that way on our brains and bodies, apparently. I think it may be much like the wild love you feel for your newborn, the kind of thing that makes it possible to get through nights when that same cherished creature is vomiting or days when he is tearing the house apart ? which, coincidentally, happens around age two and a half. (There are plenty of people who adopt older children and fall just as wildly in love, and then just as gradually mellow out on the bliss.)
I?m sure you could burn yourself out and destroy your immediate environment if you kept trying to pump the universe for NRE without a bit of a pause between. Creating a lot of drama to try to keep the wild excitement going? That?s like fracking for NRE.
To me, to get clean, sustainable NRE, you need to be open to some mystery. You can?t command that it will appear. Even though we may learn to understand every chemical change that takes place in our brains under its influence, I don?t think we?ll ever understand how to conjure it up at will. That?s both the reason not to be afraid of it and the reason not to try to block it. Would you really deny someone you loved that kind of experience, if it happened to blow by?
Speaking of how we?re wired, there has been a lot of poly brouhaha over at sex advice writer Dan Savage?s column and blog lately. He had the nerve (the nerve of that man!) to say polyamory isn?t an orientation. It seems to be chilling down to an agreement to call it an identity and leave it at that.
I don?t really care too much about the orientation vs. identity vs. lifestyle debate. To pin down being gay as a biologically based orientation appears very sound, but it ignores some of the other points on the spectrum that are just as legitimate. (I?m not ?really? gay, for instance, because I?m bisexual; it?s just an identity or a lifestyle. I think women I?ve been with would tell you differently.) I thought it was kind of a mistake to go so hard on the orientation argument in order to get equality, but then I?ve never been beaten up, blackmailed or discriminated against for who I love. Not yet, anyway.
Whether you call it orientation, identity or lifestyle, it?s clear that getting marriage and other family rights, avoiding discrimination, and living without persecution are battles that will have to be fought in a different way by polys than they were by gay people. We are going to open up these fights and by our presence alone force people to look at things in a way that confuses them and causes them to feel afraid.
To examine whether three or four people should be able to marry or enjoy rights equal to others in the societies in which they live is going to mean looking at love, relationships, life, unions, economics, law, class ? everything ? in a different way. I hope that this re-examination and transformation of damn near everything benefits every relationship, monogamous ones most definitely included.
Again, I don?t want to say that poly people are more ?evolved? or that we?re some kind of brave trailblazers. All we are saying is that relationships, every last one of them, need to be based on nothing less than mutual, equal, and ongoing consent and desire. If I say that I?m not necessarily biologically hardwired to be poly, I?m saying that I intend to enter into every relationship by choice. And as we saw over the course of the last election in the United States, where women?s autonomy became a pivotal issue, choice ? both in the having and the making ? is the most frightening and threatening thing in the world to most people right now.
Source: http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/polyamory/sustainable-relationships-and-fracking-for-love/
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